Not the messiah, just a grateful cricketer

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Adam Gilchrist meets the locals yesterday during a World Vision-sponsored visit to a slum in Chennai.Photo: Reuters

Far from the madding crowds, the teeming thousands that turn
cricket matches into frenzies of noise and passion, Adam Gilchrist
experienced some Indian masses of a more sobering kind
yesterday.

Australia's stand-in captain visited a slum in Chennai, seeing
how some of India's poverty-stricken millions get by in a barren
existence that - clashing as it does with the lives of the
worshipped cricketers depicted on glossy billboards nearby -
illustrates the enormous contrasts at play here.

An ambassador for World Vision, Gilchrist visited the charity
organisation's New Hope project centre, where hundreds of families
live with six or seven people sharing one room that is their
kitchen and bedroom. Many prefer to sleep on the streets because it
is too hot inside, and many catch malaria.

Gilchrist's visit inspired bedlam, with hundreds of people
crushing to get near him, touch him, or drape him with garlands.
One of Australia's wealthiest cricketers, who is married with two
young children, Gilchrist said the visit was not just a reminder of
what he had, but of the power cricketers had in India to make a
difference to people's lives.

"Cricket is such a major part of life in India and Steve Waugh
showed us that as cricketers, we have great power in this place and
the opportunity to do something helpful and productive with that
power," Gilchrist said of his former captain, who sponsors a home
for the children of leprosy sufferers in India.

The Australian wicketkeeper said apart from the high demands of
the cricket field, a tour of India was like riding an emotional
rollercoaster. During a one-day tour last year he was taken on a
tour of Mumbai's brothel district, where thousands of young girls
are forced to work in prostitution.

"That touched me in an extraordinary way... to the point where
the next day we played a one-dayer and I was out in the field and
found my mind drifting off and wondering what those kids were doing
at the time that I was standing in front of 40,000 screaming fans.
It was something I'll never forget, as is every experience over
here. I find India is a place where you go on an amazing emotional
ride..."